Zodiark: Good or evil? thoughts

[EaraGrace]

So what about the genocide caused by the sundering and the lives that are lost due to the unnatural nature of the mortal souls? No one seems to be addressing that in that the rejoinings would save more lives in the long run than the sundered would be claiming.

“Unnatural” is so incredibly loaded, I will never agree with such a description of human life.

And what right do the Ancients have to decide what lives are worth living? That’s not a decision for anyone to make for anyone else. Not to mention Emets own words on the topic, where he doesn’t even recognize the humanity and personhood of the sundered. I’m supposed to believe they’re doing that out of the kindness of their own hearts?

Hell, even by their own definition of personhood they were more than happy to sacrifice untold innocent people to bring back their friends. Yet these are the ones to be trusted to with the power of gods?

Well Ryne & WoL are no different to Mitron, we're also forcing Gaia to be the Gaia we know & the entire Eden plot is Ryne forcing herself on Gaia who wants nothing to do with her for like 70% of Eden story. Mitron is more a sad soul who just wanted his lover back. Also he was & wasn't taking her memories his goal was remove memories of us & give her back her original memories, basically we liked Amnesiac Gaia & wanted to keep her instead of given her memories back.

I'd say Mitron wasn't perfect but no one was perfect in how either side dealt with Gaia in Eden.

He tried to DESTROY her sense of self to allow her other memories dominance. He didn’t offer her choice like the WoL or Ryne did. At no point in the story did we ever dissuade her from making her own decisions. Mitron did. There’s no both sidesing it. He forcibly merged with her, had her attempt to destroy her memories of Ryne, and then fought to death to make sure he could have her. Gaia’s not the Ascian her soul was. She’s her own person with thoughts, feelings and ideas. No one but Mitron denied her that.

She LITERALLY cheers you on as you fight to free her!

GAIA: Now's your chance!
RYNE: Gaia's still in there, fighting to free herself from Loghrif's will!
GAIAPRIME: Even now, you would defy us!?
We will remove every last vestige of your meaningless mortal existence!

The thing is 90% of this isn’t proven. We don’t know if they could go back to that time or not, or if the rejoinings would work. There’s nothing really to lead us to believe it wouldn’t work that is. They empathize just how superior the unsundered/ancients are to the sundered multiple times and in various ways.

And the game also takes effort to show that the sundered have and will surpass the unsundered in various ways, because like all living beings the sundered and unsundered are flawed and virtuous in their own ways.

GAIAPRIME: That fragmented souls should triumph over their fears while we succumbed to ours, thereby setting our star upon a course of ruin...
That inferior beings such as you should succeed while we failed! It defies all logic!

RYNE: Compared to yours, our lives may seem insignificant.
Nevertheless, we live them to the fullest! And though it may take us a thousand years, we have the potential to build a world every bit as wonderful as yours!
But you won't even allow us a chance? To live our own lives and forge our own future?

[Theodric]

“Unnatural” is so incredibly loaded, I will never agree with such a description of human life.

Whether you agree with it or not the discussion is in regards to Emet-Selch's views on the Sundered.

Hell, even by their own definition of personhood they were more than happy to sacrifice untold innocent people to bring back their friends.

Alisae speculates during the MSQ's that she would probably seek to do the same thing were she in Emet-Selch's position.

He tried to DESTROY her sense of self to allow her other memories dominance. He didn’t offer her choice like the WoL or Ryne did.

As was pointed out in a prior post...

Gaia was irrelevant to Mitron's goals. His concern was Lohgrif, who he had made a promise to reunite with and she had accepted. Gaia is not Lohgrif, thus an obstacle he sought to overcome. You're correct in that he didn't ask her permission or try to reason with her. Yet the same can be said of the countless lives that the Scions and Warrior of Darkness have ended for mere differences in opinion/political alignment.

Ultimately, it was framed as a tragic love story. Gaia survived, Mitron and Lohgrif did not.

And the game also takes effort to show that the sundered have and will surpass the unsundered in various ways, because like all living beings the sundered and unsundered are flawed and virtuous in their own ways.

None of the victories against the Unsundered are without convenient tools to gain an edge. Against Lahabrea, not only had he been weakened by body hopping but Hydaelyn expended energy to protect against Ultima.

Against Emet-Selch, the battle was framed as exceptionally hard fought. Even the usual trick of white auracite did not work and G'raha summoned combatants to aid in the fight. In addition, Ardbert had to merge with the Warrior of Darkness to provide yet another edge.

As for Elidibus, it was once again a hard fought victory and the power of the Crystal Tower was expended in order to effectively seal him away.

I believe this is a good opportunity to remind you of this post on a previous page, as it deals with the subject of the Unsundered and how they may very well still be around in some form:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5566422

That’s you taking the position of a character the devs have written. Nowhere have they said that that is objectively true and have repeatedly written characters to argue against that point. Stop trying to dismiss this as a settled matter, it’s not.

The development team have stated repeatedly in a number of interviews that it is a matter of perspective. Individual characters argue in favour of what benefits their respective causes but that...should be a given.

I personally think that it is indeed a settled matter in the context of the game's story, which many of us are here to discuss rather than matters of morality.

Speaking of the game's story, here's a snippet of the journal entry for the battle against Emet-Selch:

You wage a titanic battle not only against Hades, but the hopes and dreams of Ascian-kind, of which he is the keeper. In the end, however, your own unwavering conviction brings the ancient being low. You have done a great and terrible thing. Pen the conclusion to this momentous chapter of history, and make your return to the Ocular.

Source: https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/S...ingers#Journal

It is quite clearly framed as a good thing for the Scions and Warrior of Darkness but a bad thing for Emet-Selch and his people. Which...makes sense, given that each were heroes with opposing causes and a firm desire to do whatever it took to protect their loved ones.

[EaraGrace]

Whether you agree with it or not the discussion is in regards to Emet-Selch's views on the Sundered.

That isn’t the context that I was responding to, which was Kizuya Katogami arguing that point themselves. I was disagreeing with their argument and the idea that that is objectively proven.

Alisae speculates during the MSQ's that she would probably seek to do the same thing were she in Emet-Selch's position.

Would need to see the exact quote. I know Y’shtola said it was logical, before disagreeing and stating it would kill millions. For Alisae, if my memory is correct I believe her point was that it was understandable to want to bring back ones loved ones. She ultimately doesn’t agree however, and stands to fight for those with her. She notices the parallels, a point I never disagreed with and wouldn’t have a problem pointing out. What is important however is not whether it is understandable, but justified and right.

And I have to repeatedly point out, this is not the same as believing the sundered are better off dead and rejoined, nor that killing a sundered is not murder, which is what I was clearly responding too.

Yet the same can be said of the countless lives that the Scions and Warrior of Darkness have ended for mere differences in opinion/political alignment.

I struggle to find a single moment where we killed someone over purely a political disagreement or opinion. Nor did we strip anyone of their memories because they dared not allow their life to be supplanted.

None of the victories against the Unsundered are without convenient tools to gain an edge.

We’re not talking exclusively fights. The value of a living being is not determined with how good they kill. The point of my quote was to demonstrate a moment where the unsundered failed to overcome something the sundered did. The embodiment of their fears in this case.

And this

The development team have stated repeatedly in a number of interviews that it is a matter of perspective. Individual characters argue in favour of what benefits their respective causes but that...should be a given.

Contradicts this

I personally think that it is indeed a settled matter in the context of the game's story, which many of us are here to discuss rather than matters of morality.

Either it’s a matter of perspective as the devs describe it, or it is a settled matter that the sundered are malformed, unnatural creatures that Kizuya Katogami describes them as. My point is that I disagree with their description and their conclusions. And to deny that morality does play a role in this discussion is to deny how this thread is playing out. It’s dripping with moral disagreements.

[Alleo]

So what about the genocide caused by the sundering and the lives that are lost due to the unnatural nature of the mortal souls? No one seems to be addressing that in that the rejoinings would save more lives in the long run than the sundered would be claiming.

We dont know that. Emet hints at least that the people survived it and we have no idea if they survived with or without their memories intact. It could be that they are simply copies of themselves with less strenght. After all the sundered ascians can retain their memories which means that they have to be somewhere stored. Maybe they lost it all and were like newborns, maybe thought just x amount of the same people with the same memories existed on the shards. After all someone had to remember that time, since we have the cave paintings.

We should also not forget that death still existed even before the whole final days. And at least in the german short story about Azem the people in danger of the volcano are said to be mortals. So who knows maybe not every Ancient was born with a huge life span. Maybe they too had different races with different life spans.

I also doubt that the rejoining would save more lifes because the Ascians plans was not that the survivors of the rejoinings (which would have nearly complete souls at that point) would survive...the only ones alive after the rejoining would be the Ascians and the x amount of Amaurotines that sacrificed themselves. IF they are able to be saved, something that the Ascians cant even be sure about because if Zodiark needed the aether to act then why would these souls still be intact? Honestly for me it sounds more that its the hope they cling to only to have a world at the end, where the source is mostly destroyed thanks to their calamities with only the Ascians as the only ones alive because they find out that nothing can be brought back. (And we should not forget that if Graha and the future Iron works did not change the past, the Ascians would have created a world that even 200 years later was on the brink of dieing...they might have messed it up completely on that)

All of this too without the knowledge if maybe Zodiark truly was just a short term solution and the sound would have been back. At least Venats group believed that he would not be the end solution.

You can refuse to agree all you want. It’s something even the devs have agreed on, that the sundering and its inhabitants are abnormal. They’re fractured beings with degraded souls. Nothing more.

The only question I remember about this that the devs answered was the one posted a few pages back. And there they did not say that the inhabitants are abnormal. They simply stated that the situation being bad would be a matter of perspective and that the worlds are unstable. The worlds being unstable does not mean that the devs believe that the inhabitants are abnormal and deserve to be eliminated. The talk about the perspective is simple too: From the view of the people living now it would be bad because they would brutally die. For the Asicans it would be good because "their god" would be back.

Just a curious question: Would you want them to go the way that we watch billions of lives including us and NPCs we know to be killed? Even at a point were we would not be fractured beings with degraded souls anymore because after the rejoining we would be nearly complete again. Yet we would still be sacrified.

[Theodric]

It's a bit more complicated than that, really. He wasn't interested in Gaia - he was in love with Lohgrif and Lohgrif was in love with Mitron. They made a promise to come together no matter what and he sought to do just that.

I'd consider it to be framed as more of a tragic love story on the part of Mitron and Lohgrif, especially since Gaia's own parting musings on the matter refer to them as separate beings who she can't help thinking about. It's even implied that somehow, Mitron and Lohgrif always find a way to come together across the ages with the implication being that they will do so again in future reincarnations of themselves.

As with so many other elements of the game's story, it isn't a black or white situation. Especially when it has been clearly established that the Ancients view the Sundered in the same way as we ourselves look upon ants.

[Kuroka]

Lohgriff and Mitron are complicated.... After all it was their promise to be together no matter what even after all those eons... Its not like hes some stalker that wants a random girl, its more like wanting your wife back that suffered Amnesia. I Kinda hate how it resolved, i really wished for him to just side with us and Gaia awaken just enough of her memory to feel for him again... having another ascian on our sides would've been nice.

[Kuroka]

Besides i wanna see how "sane" any of us would be after seeing his beloved die, being trapped 100 years and then see her reborn as a mere shadow of herself.... further, If im not wrong he even said he wished he would've died with her...


Also, ultimately they most the times only gave us a gun, it was always us mortals who pulled the trigger... I get why thats only further cementing their view of us as being worthless...

[PondHollow]

Evil and unqualified good are for children. The playerbase is mostly adults. We can do without such notions.

Zodiark is a tool.

I think an interesting question is whether he still even exists, and what would his purpose be. I expect him to be in disrepair and off purpose, possibly Hydaelyn too.

Elidibus was clearly malfunctioning.

And for some reason the Convocation came to believe that their people could be resurrected. The metaphysics of that makes no sense to me, even if resurrection is possible -- and everything suggests that it is not possible whatsoever. You sacrifice 3/4 of your population to make two creatures with specific purposes, and then all your remaining 1/4 of the people die or are converted to other things, and then you want to harvest the dregs in the Rejoining, to resurrect what? The 1/4? Wouldn't you need to harvest Hydaelyn /and/ Zodiark to bring back the full population? And that's with lossless conversion, a pipe dream even in magicks shown in-game.

If they believed such a foolish thing for so long, it's likely Zodiark's tempering came to be what every primal's tempering is: a means to self-sustainment, and nothing more. What remains of the primals is likely amoral.

[Theodric]

Insofar as the proposed inability for Zodiark to bring back the Ancients is concerned...

Although it’s not 100% clear how these things work as yet, we have some lore indicating that the plan isn’t an impossibility:

Toward the end of Shadowbringers, players defeat Hades without imprisoning him in the White Auracite. But Lahabrea was defeated in a similar way, and eventually returned. Is Hades is done for good?

NI: With Lahabrea, he wasn’t literally put into the White Auracite. But he was absorbed into the dragon’s eye, and Estinien pierced it. Although he wasn’t imprisoned in the White Auracite, you can technically say he’s in the same situation.

When Hades revealed his true form, and his soul was there, we didn’t capture it in the White Auracite. He was held down and pierced with a stake, basically. He was captured and not able to move at that point, and then the Warrior of Light struck him with the blow, so it is believed that Hades has been completely destroyed.

Source: https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fanta...ringers-ending

We see from here that Lahabrea’s soul survived, even being trapped in Nidhogg’s Eyes as they were being used to fuel Thordan. Although it is implied Estinien piercing them put him in a similar situation to the usual Ascian killing method, something to understand is this from the French version of the game:

[20:48] Urianger : Une fois privée de son corps, une âme ascienne pourrait être enfermée dans une prison d'éther... Une lame éthérée serait alors en mesure de la briser, et l'Ascien retournerait ainsi vers la mer des étoiles.
= “Once deprived of their body, an ascian soul could be locked in an aether prison... An ethereal blade would then be able to break it, and the Ascian would thus return to the sea of stars.”

Souls basically seem to have a core component, that is the soul itself, and then the soul aether comprising it. It is that soul aether which appears to have gone into fuelling the aether required for Zodiark to be summoned and repair the planet. Their plan was to be enacted once he had nurtured the life of the world and restored its vitality, as per this:



We also know from lines during the fight that Hades – with his unique power over the Underworld – saw himself as integral to their plan. Probably because that power would let him identify and pull out the souls in question.

So, the plan seems to me to be to revitalise the star, until its bursting with aether, and then recombine those souls with this aether. The exact mechanics of it are not known but it’s possible that the specific type of incorporeal aether they required was attaching to the freshly minted souls and so they would need to sacrifice those to realise the plan. None of it really seems impossible and Lakshmi is a far weaker, less sophisticated primal – there was also no individual with Hades’s specific powers in that case either, who would have sufficient understanding of how to pluck the souls out of the Primal. So let’s not assume too much off of one example, eh?

[KizuyaKatogami]

Exactly. Exactly.

For all of his talk, Emet is pretty transparently lying to himself and not really acting on good faith. This is best demonstrated in Amaurot, when he starts up the Final Days recreation for the dungeon as a test of the Scions' mettle; when they prevail against his expectations he just says their performance was underwhelming and they still aren't worthy. He sets people up to fail so when they do so he can just say "See? Still not as great as the Ancients!" and if they succeed he just moves the goalposts.

What makes him (and the Ascians in general) particularly tragic is not what happened to them, but their belief they can go back to the good old days of Amaurot if they just complete the Rejoinings and have Zodiark do his disco; the Sound, and Zodiark's summoning to stop it, created an irreconcilable rift in Amaurotine society. Even if they succeeded, it's very, very unlikely things could go back to the way they were before. (I'd even go so far as to argue at least some Ancients would be extremely unhappy with the price paid to bring them back and revolt by summoning a check against Zodiark that's even more powerful than Hydaelyn.) Elidibus realizes the folly of his crusade in his final moments, bound to it as he may be.

It's part of what makes them such wonderful antagonists, in my opinion. They are given to the same vices they condemn humanity for, tragically fighting for a cause that was lost before they even started. Perhaps back in the days of Amaurot the world was a utopia... but that time has long since passed and will never come back, Rejoined world and resurrected Ancients or no. While their motivations are sympathetic, considering that...

This bears reiterating: Zodiark is neither good nor evil. He is only as good or evil as his creators, who despite their declarations to the contrary are demonstrably not perfect beings. (The same applies to Hydaelyn as a corollary, despite attempts to demonize her for her own failings.)

The thing is 90% of this isn’t proven. We don’t know if they could go back to that time or not, or if the rejoinings would work. There’s nothing really to lead us to believe it wouldn’t work that is. They empathize just how superior the unsundered/ancients are to the sundered multiple times and in various ways. We can talk all day about what could happen or what is but it’s best to talk about what we know as fact instead of headcanon because then information gets misconstrued and people start getting the wrong ideas on things.As far as Emet goes, all the short story shows imo is that he had kept testing mortals to see if they could be improved or changed. His son's death seemed to have a big impact on him which reinforces the way his views were. I think its safe to say it was still a difficult task for him, but in the end it doesnt change reality in what he saw. The main reason that they are tragic heroes is that they bear the burden and tough decisions to see their world restored. The sundering put them in this difficult position in the first place, so they can trade some ease and discomfort now for the sake of restoring their world and the original souls/lifespans, or they abandon it all and fade away. I dont think they were "perfect beings" but they were certainly better than the sundered and mortal beings we see. As for Zodiark and Hydaelyn, i dont think either of the primals are necessarily evil. It's moreso the hearts which will dictate that which, we can inference about how they would. Elidibus is described as kind and caring in the short story, whereas we see Venat willing to go against a majority of the community for hers and a few others' for reasons unknown. So if they primals take aspects of their heart on..well. Its hard to say exactly as Venat is very much a wild card right now. But they didnt choose the name for no reason